Postmortem: Monolith's No One Lives Forever

When we
started No One Lives Forever, the team had just come off Shogo:
Mobile Armor Division, which (although critically successful) fell
embarrassingly short of our original design goals. In fact, the only thing
that saved Shogo from complete disaster was the realization, some
six months before we were supposed to ship, that there was no way to make
the game great in that amount of time. So, we concentrated on making it
fun.

Ambition
undermined Shogo. The intended scope of the project was so grand,
particularly for such a tiny team, that we were overwhelmed just trying
to get everything into the game. As a result, we didn't have time to polish
any of it. The final product is barely more than a prototype of the game
we were trying to make, even after we cut characters, settings, story
elements, and whatever else we could jettison without breaking the game.
It was simply too late to shore up all the deficiencies by the time we
realized how many there were. I'm certainly proud of Shogo as an
accomplishment, but as a game it is a grim reminder of the perils of wild
optimism and unchecked ambition.

We felt it was better to release a comparatively humble game that
got all the details right than an ambitious one that fell short
in numerous area.

We were
determined not to repeat those mistakes on our next project. Half-Life
confirmed our growing conviction that presentation is more important than
innovation: although that game is often hailed as having revolutionized
the first person action genre, it doesn't do anything spectacularly new.
What makes it so influential is that it does everything so well. The pacing
is sublime, the situations inventive, the AI incredible, and the overall
level of polish unprecedented. It's a game made up of unforgettable moments.

Polish,
therefore, was our chief mandate. We felt it was better to release a comparatively
humble game that got all the details right than an ambitious one that
fell short in numerous areas. To a great degree, we succeeded, for although
No One Lives Forever was to undergo a great deal of turmoil in
the coming months, we never let it get out of control the way we had with
Shogo. As a result, we managed to ship a product that actually
surpassed the goals we set for it. That's not to say we didn't make plenty
of mistakes or that the game is as polished as we had hoped, merely that
it was a monumental improvement over previous efforts.